John Harrington-WHAT WE USE - Gels and Gelly Rolls

Here's a video segment on the Gels and Gelly Rolls kit that we use. A transcription of the video is available after the jump.

Hands on instructional video on photography from Assignment Construct.

Transcript:
Hi, I’m John Harrington and we’re going to break out and break down the wide variety of equipment we use to deliver images to our clients. Next we are going to show you one of the equipment kits we use when we are traveling on assignment. Each kit is different and has a very specific purpose. So lets take a look.

One of the things that we use to adjust the color, whether it’s a color gel or color correction, for the shoots that we do, especially in boring office buildings is we will add color to the background with the background strobe.

Some situations we find ourselves in we need to actually convert a tungsten bulb to a daylight bulb. So that’s what we use here with this gelly roll. This gelly roll actually contains all of the various daylight to tungsten conversions. So if we have daylight lights we are going to go from a daylight light to a tungsten color temperature. Let’s go through each one of these and talk a little about each one.

In this gelly roll, we have a wide variety of well-used gels. In addition, we have gone through and pulled out from each one of the gels a Velcro with a color in it so if we are trying to hold the color up to the light we can see what color the light is going to look like. So we go from yellows to dark greens.

In a situation in where we have what’s called a true blue, or the blue of the RGB spectrum. We actually put the spectrum in down here. So each of the gels have their own number. The gels actually come with a very small number typed on it with a little label. We have actually gone through and put in the gel number so we know when to reorder. We have various grays, reds, blues, and greens.

It’s all these colors that allow us really to take an office environment that may be really boring and add these gels over the strobes to make the office environment look that much better. So that’s our color gel kit. The gel kit stores nicely and neatly inside the gelly roll. They make them in several different colors. Gray is another color that we have had in the past. Currently, we are using red to indicate that theses are the color gels as opposed to color correcting or color temperature gels.

Our next gelly roll is our CTB and our Plus Green. The CTB allows us to take a tungsten light source and convert it into daylight. Using a variety of different blue gels. Often times we need to convert daylight strobes into fluorescent color temperature lights so that the lights we are putting into a scene match the lights that we are using in the scene itself that are ambient lights. So to do that we use the green or what’s called Plus Green. There are varying shades of Plus Green. There’s Plus Green, half Plus Green, quarter Plus Green, and even eighth Plus Green.

We have gone through and labeled each one of the gels so we know exactly what they are. In addition, we have a color conversion filter which lets us know all of the color temperature specs in the gelly roll. This is something that we did, this is not something that comes with the gelly roll, because you can pretty much put any gel or any color you want into these gelly roll. We have chosen to use blue to signify all the blue CTBs and all the varying shades of Plus Green. So that is our CTB and Plus Green gelly roll.

Our next gelly roll is our CTO and minus green gelly roll. Let’s have a look at that. It is signified by the orange, which is typically used as we refer to our CTO gelly roll. Our CTO gelly roll, most people will be using those to put a tungsten gel in front of their strobe in order to convert daylight into tungsten. We have gone in again and marked CTO, half CTO, eighth CTO, so that we know which gel is which.

When we have a situation in where we want to convert fluorescent into daylight, that’s when we use what’s called minus green. minus green is the pinkish color that when you put it over a fluorescent tube, will cause that fluorescent to actually emit daylight. Again we’ve gone in and labeled it with our full CTO, three-quarter, half, quarter, and even eighth CTO. In addition, we have our minus green over here full minus green, half minus green, quarter, etcetera. Then we have a special fluora filter, which is really for those really odd lights that you just can’t correct any other way. So this is our CTO and our minus green gelly roll.

All three of these gelly rolls travel with us on assignment. If we really know we are not going to need a gelly roll, we won’t take it. We will just not pack it. However, almost always we are taking the color gelly roll and the CTO gelly roll because you almost never know what you are going to run into.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

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The Assignment Construct is a commentary about what went into, what went on behind-the-scenes, or otherwise occured before, during, or after an assignment. Everything from images of the setup, to choices of camera angle, client requests (and fulfillment), and so on.